When the early 20th century historian Frederick Jackson Turner published his “Frontier Thesis” in 1893 and announced the closing of the American West, he was writing as a contemporary of three artists whose work was instrumental in encouraging the American people to venture out into the wilderness.

The newest exhibit at Cantor Arts Center, “Frederic Church, Winslow Homer and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape,” which opened Wednesday and will remain at Cantor until May 4, showcases these three artists’ works, most of which are on loan from New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum.

According to a placard at the exhibit’s entrance, Church, Homer and Moran “recorded, romanticized and sometimes embellished views of Niagara, the Adirondacks, New Hampshire, Maine, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite. [...] The artists encouraged America to become a nation of tourists.”

The exhibit is housed on the first floor, in the Pigott Family Gallery — a cavernous space that makes the exhibit somewhat overwhelming and hard to navigate, but no less inspiring — and is loosely divided into sections that correspond to geographic regions, ranging from New Hampshire’s White Mountains to New York’s Niagara Falls to Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park.

The differences between the artists themselves, however, are what make the exhibit so striking. Though Church, Homer and Moran were all masters of depicting nature, their methods could not have been more different, and their works reflect varying perceptions of themeaning of wilderness.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) took pastoral inspiration from Houghton Farm, a West Point-area second home for a rich New Yorker, and his oil paintings are unique in the Cantor exhibit in that they almost always include people and are marked by a distinctly impressionistic tone. In fact, it is one of Homer’s most iconic paintings, “Man with a Knapsack,” that greets visitors near the entrance. The 1873 oil painting that screams impressionism depicts an austere hiker armed with a walking stick staring off into the distance against a red-orange backdrop that captures the essence of autumn in New England. “Autumn Tree Tops,” another 1873 masterpiece, provides a stark contrast between the bright colors of changing leaves in the foreground and the monotonous brown of rolling hills in the background.

In addition to his oil paintings, Homer was also a master wood cutter. Many of his wood engravings — including “The Coolest Spot in New England - Summit of Mt. Washington” — depict tourists clad in distinctly late 19th century attire sitting atop New Hampshire peaks and are marked by painstaking detail; his oil paintings, on the other hand, reflect a more abstract genius.

Perhaps the most awe-inspiring pieces in the exhibit are those of Frederic Church (1826-1900), whose affinity for the sublime in nature lends his work the sort of raw beauty that Homer’s paintings lack. The back wall of the exhibit is dominated by Church’s 1857 “Niagara,” an enormous eye-catching oil painting that depicts luminescent water cascading over the falls. A rainbow adorns the crest and, unlike Homer’s work, human figures are nonexistent, which is somewhat odd given that throngs of tourists would no doubt have been scrambling around the rocks by the falls when Church visited them in the 1850s.

None of Church’s landscape pieces — including “Campfire, Maine Woods” (1856), which is so realistic that it can hardly be distinguished from a photograph — fuse humans and nature; rather his work is defined by the bright colors and shocking contrasts most clearly evident in his 1880 work, “Sunset Across the Hudson,” which juxtaposes sheet-white snow in the foreground with sunlit purple hills in the background. In this way, Church consciously refused to illustrate an anthropomorphic nature; instead he chose to paint nature for nature’s sake.

Thomas Moran (1837-1926) did more to popularize this country’s Western wonders than any other artist before him. His paintings of Yellowstone’s geysers and Yosemite’s waterfalls exposed to Eastern Americans a wilderness that was utterly foreign and unknown to them. Indeed, many historians credit artists like Moran and Albert Bierstadt for the sweeping movement to create U.S. National Parks in the late 19th century.

It is hard to know how Moran’s 1874 “Castle Geyser, Upper Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park,” was received by his patrons in New York and Boston, but we can be sure that the painting — whose placid blue-green foreground is dominated by the shining spout of Castle Geyser in the background — was unlike anything Americans living on the east coast had ever seen.

Despite their many and obvious differences, however, Homer, Church and Moran shared a common ideology: they were fascinated by nature, and they used their artistic talents to illustrate its beauty to the American people, who themselves were just beginning to understand the importance of preserving wilderness.